It’s also currently sitting at number 15 in the Steam charts, making it the second most popular free-to-play game after the evergreen Team Fortress 2. 3 million isn’t such a bad number, too – it’s obviously dwarfed by the likes of Skyrim, but it’s almost up there with Battlefield 3′s 5 million copies. It’s also just over a quarter of the uber-popular League of Legends’ player base, too.

In addition, a retail version of APB Reloaded has launched in the US. Containing $50 worth of virtual goods, the boxed edition is priced at $29.99. To celebrate, publishers GamersFirst have introduced a “Fight Club” mode into the game, but we can’t talk about it because of, y’know, the first rule and all that.

GamersFirst have essentially republished APB with tighter vehicle controls and on a free-to-play model, which has obviously paid off for players who want to dip in and see what it’s all about. We’ve found the core experience of APB to be much the same – its in-depth customisation and social networking systems are not to be overlooked, but the running and gunning remains flawed.

How many of Reloaded’s 3 million will stick around remains to be seen – it could steadily decrease to a huddle of enthusiasts, or it could carry on gathering players. But the Reloaded team have certainly done enough to ensure it’s not going to dramatically collapse like Realtime Worlds’ previous incarnation of the game.

We’re sure at least one of those 3 million players will be reading this – what do you reckon to the reboot?

It’s now called APB Reloaded, and you can download the client for free now. GamersFirst say that this is an open beta phase. They’ll continue to fix bugs and refine things as players go to war. You get to create a cop or a crook using the fantastic character creation suite, and then roam the city of San Paro in squads, where you’ll be assigned missions designed to dynamically match you up with players of a similar level. Will it work? Has it improved since it we gave it 55 in our APB review back in summer 2010? There’s only one way to find out. Are you playing it? What do you think so far?

The invites have been sent out to people who took part in the testing of APB the first time, with messages headed “You’re invited to sign up for the APB: Reloaded Closed Beta. You are receiving this email because you previously created an APB account.”

The invite declares that: “You’re one of the first to be invited to sign up for the Closed Beta launch of APB: Reloaded! Sign up today for your chance to be a Closed Beta tester. Remember, if you don’t sign up, you won’t have the chance to be one of the first to take back the mean streets of San Paro. When you sign up, we’ll make sure you receive the latest APB news, including information about restoring your old character.”

The email does not state when the exact date of the beta launch is, but recent news suggests it’s due sometime next month.

Johann – the ‘Pretty-Much-Anything’ Engineer on APB Reloaded – explains on the blog that after experiencing a high level of difficulty implementing Punk Buster into APB, the system is now ready for use in Reloaded. “We’ve just completed a full upgrade of PunkBuster to the very latest version. I’ve been going over the issues we’ve seen before, and Even Balance is confident that all of them will be fixed in this version.”

He also explained what Reloaded’s anti-cheat policy would be: “If a player is positively identified as running a known aimbot, he/she will be immediately kicked from the district and a notification message will be sent to all other players in that district. The cheater’s account and PC will be immediately banned for a period of time, during which the person will not be able to play using that account on any computer. If an aimbot is detected a second time, the account and computer will immediately be permanently banned, all monies paid will be forfeited and any upgrades or customizations will be revoked.”

With the beta due to start in February, Johann has plans to ensure they make the most of the experience in regards to making APB as cheat-proof as possible. “We also plan to have anti-cheating enabled on all servers from the very start of Closed Beta, allowing us to get as much testing done as possible. That way if any more surprises turn up, we should have more than enough time to fix them.”

Posting on the APB: Reloaded blog, GamersFirst CEO Bjorn Book-Larsson said: “The goal is to let you keep ALL customizations you created using the old game. You will basically be unique thanks to you having played the game “back in the day” and our goal is to make sure your many gazillion of hours of investment do not go to waste.”

It’s great news to hear that the APB resurrection project is going the whole nine yards and paying respect to those players who lost hours of their lives to customisation projects. The closed beta is due to start up next month.

For more on GamersFirst’s plans to relaunch APB, check out our interview with GamersFirst CTO and COO Bjorn Book-Larsson, or check out the official APB reloaded blog for news on how the relaunch is progressing.

[via Bluesnews]

He goes on to explain GamersFirst’s plans for customisation in the game. “For APB we have another great feature (and challenge) that we have to take into account as we design the new Basic vs Premium accounts – the customization system. The customization system can generate incredibly complex objects that at runtime get pushed to all the other players in a session, which means that the more complex the customization, the more stuff has to be pushed to everyone in a particular game.

“Therefore one of the original RTW guys (now contracting with us) Johann, came up with what we think is a really elegant solution to the problem of getting flooded with complex content; instead of limiting what you can customize as a free player, you will be allowed to customize almost anything, but you will not be able to store (and share) complex customizations above a certain complexity level unless you are a Premium player AT THE TIME OF CUSTOMIZATION.

“This has several benefits, first it would limit the amount of content pushed to everyone else in the game from free players (which would reduce the amount of loading required), but it would also let you be Premium for just one month, create a lot of customizations that month, and then use those items later on (even if your Premium membership has lapsed).”

For more on GamersFirst’s plans to resurrect APB, check out our own interview with Bjorn Book-Larsson.

Bjorn Book-Larsson: From our side we initially thought it was a really good concept. So from a distance we had said “hey, this seems like an interesting new title, it seems like there’s a lot of customisation and user generated content features”, and we were interested in the game, on a professional level, from the outside. Then what happened was, we picked up the game because, from our point of view we think that it has a lot of really good critical components that can make a good foundation for a long term free-to-play project. The huge difference between free-to-play and retail sales is that with retail sales you have to make your numbers in the first 30 days, and in the free-to-play model you have the expectation and/or luxury of putting the game out there, and modifying it to match what people actually do in the game. For us we think that the game has a lot of really good features. It has a lot of customisation parts, and it has various innovative ideas and ways to expand the traditional shooter genre. The things that were problems, like the balancing, and the weird monetization methods are things that we feel pretty confident we can address, especially because we have about seven years of publishing experience in the free-to-play space. Drawing on all that experience, we’re taking all the things we learned from all those other games and incorporating them into APB.

PC Gamer: What is it about APB that makes it suitable for a free to play model?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: Well, it already has a lot of components that we want in free-to-play. It already had an in game trading system so you can trade things back and forth, which is usually an important component to free-to-play experiences. It has very a evolved concept of “choose this side”. We have a game called Knight Online where we have two nations fighting, it has a lot of elements that we have seen be successful in free to play games. We don’t think it’s there yet, because one of the key things in a free-to-play game is that you actually have to make it fun and engaging for the free player, and then for those who do microtransactions and/or become premium members, or premium players by making a purchase, they have to have some slight benefit or advantage in the game, but you also still have to maintain the balance throughout the game so that the two types of players continue having fun, so there’s a lot of that type of balancing that we have to work on to make it work, but we feel like it has the bones, the skeleton of a potentially really good free-to-play title, and we have to get there in the next six months or so, and then we can release it as a free-to-play title.

PC Gamer: You mentioned microtransactions and a premium service, what kind of items will players be buying in APB, and what would the premium service involve?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: There’s many different models for the free-to-play games We have another game called War Rock. War Rock was a game made in Korea back in 2006, we launched it in the US and the world in 2007, so it’s sort of a last generation game, but it has a lot of innovative ideas. Basically we’re going to borrow some things from those types of titles, other games like Combat Arms, which we don’t publish, but there’s other games like that out there. One of the easiest things to do with this game would be to add leased weapons, so for thirty days you lease certain weapon types. Then for premium access you would essentially allow certain expanded features or complexities of customisation for those who are premium players, and those who are free players get less complex things included in the basic membership level. Beyond that, there’s multiple ways to monetize free-to-play shooter games. The leasing method is probably the simplest and most straightforward. There’s another method called the ‘wear method’ where you pay because your guns wear out, you have to repair them. There’s another one that we generally refer to as the ‘grinding and trading’ method, which is more common in RPGs, and then there’s another one called the ‘insurance model’ where you get to build stuff, but they blow up, and if they blow up you can have insurance to cover your losses, if you will. What’s interesting about free to play is that there are a lot of financial models behind it that actually mimic real world systems, so you drive on the same real world motivations. The reason you buy insurance for your car is because you don’t want to lose the whole thing. You don’t necessarily pay subscription fee to have a car, you might have car payments for it, but you’ll have insurance, so there’s models like that which work in other games. What we’re going to do is, initially, we won’t go there across all those models. We’re starting very simple, just adding the two core components that have worked well in our other shooters players, and that would be just leased weapons and premium accounts or premium services.

PC Gamer: Apart from putting in the new payment model, will you be making any changes to the mechanics of the game itself?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: Some. There’s more balancing issues. One of the key issues the game seemed to have when it came out, what happened was, first of all you had to pay for game time, which was sort of weird. The second thing was, if you showed up in a game, because of their version of progression, if you got shot when you turned up in a match, you might be shot by a gun that you had no access to, because you hadn’t gotten murdered for nine hours yet, so you didn’t have the gun. I think that a lot of those things will remain, but now make more sense. If you’re a free player and you don’t want to buy the premium weapons then you can grind and eventually earn it, but you don’t have to necessarily pay for that painful grinding process. I think they accidentally created was, in this game, you had to actually pay to grind, which is unheard of in the free-to-play space. Those kind of balances are the ones we’ll focus on the most. There’s a few other balances too, such as, for instance, individual gun balances, which we do want to modify, so things like gun ranges and the disparity between weapons actually has to be much less. We’ve found from other games that you want to have just a couple of percentage points of balance difference between weapons, otherwise it becomes essentially a slaughterfest one way or another. So there’s various balance fixes like that, and then there’s various small annoying things, and this may not be in the first re-release, but when you run up to a car you often accidentally end up in the back seat, which is a little surprising! There are rare situations where you would probably want to be in the back seat, but 80 or 90 percent of the time you want to be drivers seat because the car’s empty. I think the original designers were very concerned with some purity of design which may have gotten in the way of the gameplay.

PC Gamer: Why do you think APB failed on its first release?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: I think part of it of course was that it was such a huge investment. I mean, the expectations were huge, and therefore when it didn’t start paying off in the first month or so it was almost doomed on its own expectations. I think it actually had the potential in the long term to potentially work, and obviously we believe it’ll work in the long term, but I think the hybrid retail subscription model that they had tried, for the mechanic they designed I don’t think it was going to work, ever. In order to succeed with that mechanic you would have to really polish some of the core components in order to convince enough players to be a subscriber. If you look at other games like Eve Online, Eve Online started as a modest, much smaller game, and over time they grew it, it got more and more of a devoted fanbase, and it really took several years before it got to the level where it is today. I think that’s the kind of game development structure they would have to keep in mind, like they should probably have considered going out with some sort of live beta, be in a live beta for a year or more, preferably with thousands of players participating in order to polish the game, in order to make it something that was sustainable. I don’t think they had planned that in, it was more planned as a retail release with EA pushing a bunch of boxes everywhere. I think the issue there is that the traditional publishers haven’t really yet – EA has experimented quite a bit with the digital distribution sales type stuff, but I think the free-to-play model is very hard for traditional publishers to predict, and if you don’t do a straight retail or console title it’s a very very long term, nefarious, difficult to predict process. I just don’t think they had the stomach to go all out, which I actually think would have worked for them.

PC Gamer: Then the advantage of the free to play model is that you can have the game out there for a long time, have a lot of people playing it, and then update it as it goes on.

Bjorn Book-Larsson: Yeah. I mean, in fact, we’d say about 80 percent of the work may happen after the game goes live, so to some extent not a lot of work goes in initially, but we have games today that have really existed as games for as much ten years, and then they have as many as 50,000 simultaneous players even ten years after they initially were launched, so these are pretty substantial MMOs. I guess the concept is surprisingly simple, which is: in a free to play game, no-one will pay for it unless they have fun. Surprise! So the net results is that you have to spend all your efforts following users around, figuring out what it is they do that is fun, and then effectively focus on giving them more stuff in the areas where they spend most of their time, around the things that they prefer to do. Often we’re surprised at what users actually do. We might design something because we think “hey, this’ll be great”, and they don’t even do it, but they find an alternate use of something we did, and they go off on a complete tangent and do stuff. I think being humble about the fact that as a designer you can’t so much predict what users will do so much as throw out a lot of good ideas and hope that users latch on to some of them, and then you have to measure and measure and measure what people do.

PC Gamer: So player feedback will play an important part in APB’s development?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: Yeah, I mean, as a company we’re called GamersFirst, and the reason is our goal is to follow what gamers do and give them that. We’ve existed as a company for seven years and it’s funny because we’re not especially huge or well known, we’re somewhat known, but it’s one of those things where the velocity of this type of release cycle is that the game should last, and almost be a platform from which you launch a lot of different experiences. With War Rock for instance, we just launched a collaborative mode where you play with team members as opposed to trying to kill everyone else, and it was huge, it turned out there was a huge demand for that type of gameplay mode, so we’re continuously doing that kind of work, and those are the kinds of things that we have to bring to APB as well.

PC Gamer: What new experiences do you want to add to APB as it develops?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: In the short term, obviously, a lot of things. It would be great if there was a way for clans or teams to have more collaboration, because right now you get thrown out in to a big city and it’s a little bit tricky or difficult to pick encounters against other teams. If you think of things like the e-sports leagues that are out there in Europe, in War Rock for instance we have a lot of clan versus clan fights, so we do want to set up a method for those smaller groupings to stay coherent, because that kind of social dynamic will actually perpetuate the game much longer than an individual experience. I think if you look at the design of the game, it was very tailored towards an online individual experience to some extent, because you were thrown into a large group of people, but there wasn’t really a direct mode for clans to take on another clan and be ranked against them, or there wasn’t an easy way to do it, it wasn’t central. I think that’s one of the first things we’ll do. We might accomplish that by adding some session based gameplay. There are a couple of maps that the original had already finished, so we might bring those out and let people join those smaller maps in some form of clan mode. There’s other changes as well, there were some interesting concepts around the cars, there was some potential racing components that existed in the original code, so there are various experiences like that which are close at hand. I think, three to five years out, the goal would be to take advantage of the really cool customisation tools, and potentially build several different game experiences like this around the game. Because it already has a really solid social district, there’s nothing really stopping us from allowing you to enter different worlds of engagement from that social district, not necessarily just the large scale San Paro financial districts, but you could go do collaborative gameplay, or a session based game, or some other kind of interactions using that same character that you’ve built.

PC Gamer: It sounds like you’re taking hold of some ideas that were already in the code that Realtime worlds didn’t implement, and using that as a jumping off point?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: Yeah, we’re sort of trying to reuse what they had started with, but I think there are a lot of things that weren’t even built in code which we’re going to have to add, but obviously the first few months is really focused on consolidating on the things that are there. In the real long term, we’re trying to envision: what if we wanted to launch multiple game experiences based on different user types? One of the things to keep in mind is that as a company we have about 30 million registered users, out of which about half are registered to play shooter games, so those users, quite a large audience, are ready, and we have a pretty good idea of how they behave and what they play. So we can tell you how many of those have signed up to play collaboratively as opposed to competitively within the shooter groups, so based on that we can tailor game changes to what it is that they want to do.

PC Gamer: So obviously there’s a lot to be added to the game, is there anything you’re taking out?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: Possibly we will try to reduce parts of the game. One of the issues is that the game client is quite large, so what we might look to do is try to create two versions of the client, one which is a smaller version, and one which is an improved version. Those are details to be worked out after the first batch of changes. We might have a starter pack, and then an enthusiast version for those who have the latest and greatest hardware.

PC Gamer: When the game comes out, are there any plans to gift items or services to players who have already paid for APB?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: We will try to accommodate those former players if we can. The issue is that of course the former players were distributed to by EA, and I know that EA has been giving refunds, and we’re not really engaged with that process. It’s a tricky question that we don’t have an answer to yet, if there’s a technical or even operational way to recognise all the former players then we will. If there’s not, then some of them may have to start over, but at least we hope they can reclaim the characters that they created, but they’ll have to create new accounts on our services in order to do so.

PC Gamer: So you do plan to let people take through characters they’ve already created?

Bjorn Book-Larsson: If possible, that’s a huge caveat. Obviously, as you can imagine, since EA has been doing the distribution there has been a lot of somewhat unanswered questions around that. Once that gets worked out, which I actually think will take a little bit of time, we would probably have a solid answer at the end of this year.

PC Gamer: Thanks for your time.

Savygamer* is reporting that EA are offering alternative downloads from their store for digital purchasers of the doomed action MMO APB. People who have contacted EA through their support site and asked for a replacement game have received offers of any title from the EA store, which includes the likes of Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. No news yet of anything similar for those who bought boxed copies.

“Mark absolutely loves APB, and everyone here loved what they saw. We’ve got our hands full of Gears Of War 3, BulletStorm and the recently announced Project Sword. If any talks like that are going on, then they would be confidential.”

A big fat maybe, then.

Yesterday we reported that APB’s servers were shutting down. If you’re curious, here’s our APB review.

[via BBC]

“APB has been a fantastic journey, but unfortunately that journey has come to a premature end. Today we are sad to announce that despite everyone’s best efforts to keep the service running; APB is coming to a close. It’s been a pleasure working on APB and with all its players. Together we were building an absolutely amazing game, and for that, we thank you. You guys are awesome!

From all of the Realtime World staff we thank you for your continued support.

The servers are still up, so join the party and say goodbye!

- Ben ‘APBMonkey’ Bateman (Community Officer)”

[via Edge]

*He mostly refers to himself in the third person.

In his blog post, he’s steered clear of laying the blame on APB’s design flaws, reasoning that in a company of around 300 people that managed to burn through $100 million, “the problems had to run deeper than [APB].”

He also cites an example of the kind of advanced bureaucracy that was probably at least partly responsible for the rough state of APB at launch. One quality assurance person took the time to trawl through the beta forums to find every possible bug mentioned by players, and they were told off because that was the remit of another department. That other department’s job was just to assign a number between 1 and 100 to how positive the forums had been that week, not to collect bugs. So who was collecting bugs from the forums? It looks like everybody thought it was someone else’s job, or was actively prevented from doing it because someone else thought it was someone else’s job.

He’s promising more soon. It’s well worth following his blog. You can read the full post here.

In the two months since APB was released, the game has gained 130,000 registered players, playing an average of four hours a day. The new figures also give us an insight into the success of APB’s unusual pricing scheme. Unlike traditional subsciption MMOs that see players paying a fixed monthly subscription, APB also offers the option of buying hours of game time that can be cashed in whenever the player wants. It also features microtransactions for specific game items. This rakes in $28 a month from the average user, a figure that Joint Administrator Paul Doinis claims to be the “highest of any game out there”.

Maths time! Let me just grab the PC Gamer abacus. 130,000 users at $28? That’s $3,640,000 a month. Is that really the income of a failing MMO?

EDIT: Fail maths is fail.

On Wednesday, 157 of over 200 Realtime Worlds employees lost their jobs as corporate restructuring firm Begbies Traynor began to tackle the job of restructuring and selling the Dundee company to help offset its accrued debts, estimated at £3m. Joint administrator Ken Pattullo said: “As a smaller entity, MyWorld is attracting considerable interest from potential buyers. Twenty three members of the team who had been working on the project clearly add value to it as a standalone business, hence the fact we have been able to offer a limited number of those jobs back.” Project: MyWorld originally had around 60 team members working on the social world-building game, which was initially expected in 2011 before Realtime Worlds went into administration.

We’ll be keeping an eye on MyWorld, as well as APB’s ongoing patch process, and keep you updated on how they look.

A spokesperson for the corporate rescue firm Begbies Traynor has said that they “want to offer reassurance to gamers that APB will not only continue as an online service but will be improved and supported 100% during this restructure.” They’re aiming to effectively transform RTW into a well oiled, APB-developing machine. They’ve put a test realm online that you can try out here, with the following changes to the core game on that realm:

• Improved vehicle handling
• Time for open world vehicle break-ins has been lowered from 10 to 3 seconds
• Arrest and Rescue times have been lowered
• All weapons rebalanced and now include recoil
• All weapons fire out to 100 metres
• All weapon audio has been updated
• Crouch is now client-side predicted
• Accuracy modifier on sprinting
• Accuracy now regains over time rather than instantly
• Vehicle husks now block weapons fire
• Field of view is now weapons specific
• Hit VFX should now align with the direction of the weapons fire correctly.
• Added graphics options for Dynamic Shadows, Environment Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, High-Quality Bloom, Distortion Value, Anisotropy, and Anti Aliasing.
• Various VoIP crash fixes

They’ve also added some new hats and outfits, instrument packs, and body kits for your car. We’ll let you know if it’s any good.

Develop are reporting that the business has been handed over to the corporate rescue firm Begbies Traynor Group. Their source also told them that APB will live on in the hands of another company. We’ll bring you new information as it becomes available.

[via Develop]

Alright, here’s Realtime Worlds’ new game you can explore “early next year.”

Looks cool! I sure hope they can keep those plans to give APB a major overhaul at the top of their agenda, though. There’s a post on the MyWorld blog that more or less fails to answer that concern, but does broadly address the “are you crazy? You’re announcing another game?” thing.

“Realtime Worlds was founded with the dream of someday delivering on the promise that Project: MyWorld represents. Along the way, separate teams were created to make Crackdown and APB with technologies developed on Project: MyWorld.”

Ahhh, so APB was their little a side project. I see. Joking aside, it does look a little bit lovely.

[via Develop]

From the post by lead systems designer Jericho, “Realtime Worlds’ goal is to grow APB into the game that its players want it to be, so we’ll be asking for comments, posting polls and throwing ideas up for you to mull over at various points throughout the process.”

Here are the main points they’re focusing on:

• Combat
  RTW are evaluating “almost every aspect” of the shooting in APB, from the basic feel of gunplay to the statistics of individual weapons.
• Matchmaking
  They’re improving the match-you-against-Sauron matchmaking mechanism that made some of your earlier fights so frustrating.
• Vehicle Handling
  This looks like a top priority for RTW – they said they’re already underway on a major fix for some of the wonky handling that’ll make it “less slippy overall”. You’ll still be able to drift around corners, though.
• Missions
  They’re adding more interactive missions with more strategic choices.
• Rulesets
  APB’s biggest, coolest promise remains just a promise: custom rule sets for different servers. They name-drop a Newbie rule set that’ll be safer for new players, a Pure Skill rule set which may include locational damage, and the Chaos rule set, where all players can shoot eachother.

You can read our APB review here. We’ll let you know when you can jump into a test realm and try some of these out. I think it’s great that Realtime Worlds are willing to address the major issues with the game, especially if they’re taking pains to leave the core experience unchanged for those who enjoy it. Still, I wonder if they’ll manage to pull it off – it seems like a tall order. What do you think?

They’ve faithfully reproduced the uniforms and vehicles of London’s top terrorist-catching, Queen-protecting, London-patrolling bad asses, complete with shiny jacket and black body armour variants. Look at their hats! See also the Strathclyde police flavour. I’m sure people have recreated infamous gangs by now, but it’s nice to see some idolising of the brave ladies and gents who keep us safe in our beds.

Read our APB review here.

Right now, the Human Avatar project would like you to to vote on which of two young men get bundled off to be customised by a mob rule of forumites, APB players, and 4chan. Looks like little Josh the freerunner is about to win this dubious honour. You can vote on his tattoos, piercings, clothes, haircut, and bust size in the coming weeks. I’ll keep an eye on it for you – remember that 4chan managed to get their webhost listed as the most influential man of all time by TIME magazine in 2009 – what’s some MMO to that?

Download the MP3 here, subscribe here, and find our older podcasts here.

Tim, Tom, baby Boomer and Graham. Taking the pic: Craig.

[via APB.com, image thanks: Dead End Thrills]

20,000 community members will each receive a key for the APB beta, granting free access to the online car-crunching cops and robbers game until June 19. Download the client from APB.com and create your character; we’ll start sending keys out daily on June 14 until our supply is exhausted.

Update! The beta has now ended.

You’ll get five hours in the action districts, and unlimited time in the game’s social district until the event is over. Think of it as a cool Second Life, with clothing designs, car art and musical compositions made in the game’s unbelievably adept editors. We suggest you sign up to the Enforcer side and create a female character, because that’s how PC Gamer rolls.

See you in San Paro.